The research project described herein consists of a 3-year longitudinal study of school-age /s/-misarticulators. The periodic speech sampling, across the 3 years, or every other week during the school year and once a month in the intervening summers, will be achieved through sentence imitation and semi-spontaneous speech tasks. The patterns of self-correction and maintenance displayed by an initial group of 56 /s/-misarticulating kindergartners will be analyzed in terms of: (a) type of articulatory formation error (lateralizing, interdentalizing, fronting), (b) consistency of misarticulation (percentage of error instance and (c) phonetic contexts in which acceptable/unacceptable productions occur. Monthly ANOVAs and regression analysis using error type, degree of consistency, and context sensitivity data will be used to predict those children who maintain and those who spontaneously self correct their misarticulation during the 3-year period of study. The results of this research will lead to criteria useful for prediction of sub-groups of misarticulating children who will/will not need articulation therapy.